


A Shapeshifter in 2018

by 1Lucid1



Series: A Shapeshifter in 2018 [1]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: F/F, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-04-24 16:50:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14359593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1Lucid1/pseuds/1Lucid1
Summary: Hey you~ thanks for checking out my work! Plot Summary in the notes at the bottom of the work!This is part of an ongoing piece I've been writing for a while, and one I've really enjoyed working atIt's kind of been an unobtainable dream of mine to write an Animorphs Fanfiction since the series is influential on me every day. My original character here is a bit of a self insert which I think works really well with the nature of the storyAnyways, I expect to be updating every two weeks or so, but that's pretty flexible! I intend for this to be a true novel length, so it could be anywhere from 15-30 chapters





	1. Chapters 1 + 2

CHAPTER 1

My name is Marina.

No, I can’t tell you my last name. It’s too dangerous. They could find me, or much worse find… it. I can’t tell you what school I go to, or even what state I live in.  
Let me back up. I’m not some conspiracy theorist just paranoid that some government organization is targeting me because I’m an anti establishment queer bookworm. Which I am. But that’s not why they’d target me. I’m really kind of normal, when you get down to brass tax. I have a couple of jobs, go to college, and managed to pay my taxes on time this year. I even have a cat and an apartment and all that. Maybe you’d give me a weird second glance if you saw me on the street, but you’d never expect me to be witness to some kind of sci-fi phenomena, right?  
I had something incredible happen to me. What I’m going to tell you might sound fake- I mean, it does sound fake, but I guarantee you, this happened to me.  
… I still don’t know what to do about it.  
One of my jobs is as a waitress at one of the local restaurants, and I’ve grown to love it over time, despite the occasional rude customer. I enjoy the pace of it, the appreciation people give when they see how hard you really work. That and my coworkers are sweet. My boss, Mr. Lucci is also continually kind, despite how difficult it is to understand his broken, northern Italian flavor of English.  
“Bye, Marina, y grazie!.”  
“Bye, sir! Grazie.” I stashed my apron in the small employee cubbie near the back and ran a hand through my hair, making sure everything was set for me to leave. Roger, the team neophyte, scurried past me with two arms full of dishes straight from the kitchen.  
“Wait, Roger!” He skidded to a halt,buckling under the weight of three plates of steaming hot Italian food.  
“H-hi, Marina- do-?” I waved away his question and picked up the side arancini and put it on the plate with the correct meal. “Oh, sorry!”  
I took one of the heavy, carbohydrate-laden plates off of his hands and smiled kindly. “It’s fine! This is only your second week, and God knows the menu’s confusing.”  
“Ey!” Mr Lucci called, pointing to the statue of the Mother Mary above the counter. “Dio sta ascoltando, Marina!” I laughed and set the plate down on the table of five that Roger had been set with. “Bye, Roger.” He nodded weakly at me under the doting hand of a sickly sweet Italian mother now ordering more food.

The town was bustling with shoppers crawling for new purchases to add to their collections, and I was having no part of it. Work had been pretty high energy and I was ready to go home and read; Or work on my studies- anything where I could have some much needed alone time. Most people said reading for class was more than enough reading material for them, but lately I’d found that nothing could satisfy me quite like a novel, and I had abandoned a few social events just to finish some books. A good book could provide me the kind of solitude I needed after the excitement of the everyday.  
The balmy, evening summer air made for a beautiful walk home through my regular route. It was past the bulk of the busy part of town and through a few side streets, depositing me onto the warm but long road that was my street. Aside from my actual apartment, my favorite place on the street was an old cemetery I knew well, filled with broken tombstones and backed by a forest that I had only ventured into once. My bulky headphones provided me with a perfectly isolating sense of musical atmosphere, turning my every step into a beat to the rhythm. The cemetery could be a pretty lonely place, but the music I brought turned the foreboding forest into an opportunity for an exploratory ambling, complete with soundtrack. A sharp meow broke through the soft music cushioning my thoughts, and I peered through the lowering shadows and saw a pair of gleaming eyes bouncing erratically in my direction.  
“Hey, kitty!” The eyes meowed again and became a cat, slinking out of the darkness to rub my leg. I bent down to scratch the old cat’s chin. “How are you doing, kitty. Life treating you well? Been catching lots of birds?.” He gave me a knowing purr and put a single paw onto my bent knee. The neighborhood was flooded with cats and part of me suspected a crazy old cat lady to be hiding her hoard in one of the big, fancy houses no one ever saw people leaving or entering.  
The road dipped sharply after that, cut through by a railroad that had recently been redone, and was now covered in all sorts of signs warning people to look both ways. I crossed it and trudged up the hill to my apartment.  
It had felt like any other day. Deep into the busy nature of my own life, just far enough from home to be able to pretend I’d always been this way. I was burrowed too deep within my own day to day routine to imagine anything incredible happening. I had done it- I had successfully fooled myself into thinking everything was normal.

And then something happened that I’ll never forget. It started like a firecracker that had been thrown into the air with abandon, that red and yellow spark twirling and rotating in the near dark. I almost turned to shield my face, thinking something was wrong with the power lines, but as the sparks began to oscillate in a pattern, I couldn’t tear my gaze away. It was as if an invisible hand was slowly drawing a wide shape in the air above me and the edges began to warp with heat. I was about to duck under it and get out of harm’s way when the air around the now large ring began to bubble like some thick, gelatinous liquid. It popped, sizzled and stretched, turning the sky behind it into a funhouse mirror of nightmares. The sparks spat once, twice, three times and expanded out, showering the asphalt below with golden rain and splitting the very air in front of me. Wide eyed and terrified, I took a step back, sweating hands clutching the straps of my backpack for dear life. With a gust of hot, searing air that sent me flying backwards, the air was ripped apart by the sparks, revealing- a door? A gateway? A portal? I scampered to my feet and gazed through the golden spark rimmed portal into- a different world? My bleary eyes could hardly make it out at first, but beyond the entrance was a battle. A cacophonous din of roars, gunfire and screams echoed from the portal. A bear the size of a small car swatted at a pair of humans armed with guns who were finished off by vicious looking tiger. A jeep zoomed past, sending a wolf and a boy flying, landing roughly on the dirt near the portal. From the boy’s hands skittered, through the portal- a blue, glowing box.  
Somehow, through the noise of battle I could hear the soft hum it emitted, see the delicate blue hue it spilled onto the darkened asphalt. Me and the boy locked eyes, and something inside me suddenly clicked.  
Marco?  
As the portal gave a loud, crackling sputter, the boy lunged for the box, a desperate fervor in his eyes, but the portal shrank and shrank and the wolf pulled him back just as the collapsing portal would have taken his hand.  
My eyes had been nearly blinded by the portal’s light, and now the near-darkness was only broken by the bright, soft hue of the blue box. I was transfixed.  
Slowly, it began to dawn on me. Amongst the scattered fires burgeoning into life, the Escafil device was… mine? My heart pounded, threatening to beat out of my chest, drowning out all other noise. I crawled on hands and feet, and as the sky began to weep, I reached out to touch the device.  
“No!” I realized, drawing my hand back in awe. Headlights then flooded the road and I snatched the small box up through my shirt and dashed to the side of the road. The car stopped and rolled down the window.  
“Hey, kid! You see that lightshow? What in the hell was that?”  
“N-no idea, ma’am!” I stammered. “Some kind of- um- electrical thing?”  
“If that’s the case then you best get out of this sudden rain, you hear me? Stay safe!” And she drove away. I nodded, belatedly, and looked down slowly at the glowing device clasped through my shirt.  
This can’t be possible. How is this possible?  
Mind racing, I sprinted home through the near downpour. That one image kept surfacing to my mind, over and over. Marco, wide eyed and scared to death, willing to sacrifice his arm for the Escafil device. And who wouldn’t? This object was one of the most powerful tools I could imagine. But to see the battle, the terror, the determination of- the Animorphs? It all resurfaced like a diver coming for air, filling my body with the memories of countless hours spent reading book after book, reading and rereading a fantasy that unlocked some deep, powerful emotion inside of me for years and years. This was like a dream come true.  
I crashed through the door to my apartment, ripping the keys out and throwing them on the living room couch.  
A shock of dirty, light brown hair leaned out of the kitchen. “Hey Marina- I’m making shrimp, do you-”  
“Can’t talk now, Eva!” I nearly shouted. Poor Eva, I was never like this. She probably thought I was pissed at her. I’d deal with that later. As I shut the door behind me, the device became impossible to ignore sitting innocently in my hand, and I threw it onto my bed.  
It pulsed emotionlessly, even as I reminded myself boxes couldn’t have emotions. I took off my shoes and socks and- I stopped. I could feel the presence of it boring into the back of my head, and I slowly turned around, eyes locked to it.  
My mind was churning faster than before.  
Aliens are real.  
Andalites exist.  
I could become any animal I touch.  
Marco. Jake. Cassie. Tobias. Rachel. Ax. They’re all real. Real. Real. Real.  
A knock at the door. “Hey, uh Marina- are you okay in there?” Jorge’s voice.  
“I’m fine!” I shouted back. “Just- busy!” I took a deep breath. The cube stared blankly, deeply, knowingly at me, as if it could see what I was thinking. A bird outside my window in the beating rain chirped defiantly, and my eye threatened a tear. To be able to fly. To sing, to chirp and flit from tree to tree. To slink between boxes as effortlessly as a cat, or become as small as a mouse… the idea was too much to resist.  
I reached out, hand shaking, knowing this was my one chance, and touched the cool, featureless surface of the device and closed my eyes. After a moment, I opened one eye to peek. I didn’t feel anything, and the cube hadn’t changed.  
“Hmm.”  
I closed my eyes again and focused, attempting to clear my mind from many thoughts and letting it rest on the cool, metal-like side of the cube. I recalled the state that Jake felt when touching the cube for the first time, and I imagined Elfangor, in his final moments, touching the other side of the cube, willing me the afforded power. I imagined myself gaining the form of another animal, becoming truly and forever connected to the instincts of that animal. Slowly, from the back of my mind, it felt like something simply changed. A calmness came over me that washed away my worry like a spray of the sea, and I felt a small light travel up my bare arm, through my shoulder, and directly into my heart. I wanted to cry but didn’t, holding back the tears calmly with the spell of the Escafil device. I could feel, clearly as I would feel a rough rock on the beach, the purest, wildest childhood dream spring to life. The coolness over me melted away like the fastest Spring’s snow and I drew back my hand from the device. It was glowing magnificently, showering me in the light blue of the Andalites.

Another frantic knock on my door.  
“Marina? Marina?! Can you hear me? Just- tell me you’re alright in there!”  
I opened the door calmly. Jorge and Eva were standing, bodies tense, scanning me for harm. “Hey. I’m fine.”  
Jorge looked from Eva to me, expression anxious. “Well, you ran past us and you seemed- I don’t know, you seemed frantic, or- or scared, like you were in danger, and then you weren’t answering us-”  
“And then there was some weird blue light coming from under your door,” Eva interjected.  
“I’m okay, guys, seriously!” I said confidently. I had to hold my hands behind my back because they were shaking. My whole body was probably shaking, honestly, I couldn’t believe what was happening.  
As soon as I had assuaged the primary concerns of my roomates, I shut the door and turned back to the blue box, which had reduced its glow and was humming quietly on the blankets.  
“So.” I said out loud. “I…” I felt the need to say it. “I can morph.” My cat, Cork, was hiding somewhere, probably scared off from my antics. Morphing into her felt strange, a breach of privacy, since I already took care of all her needs. Plus it could take an hour to find her in the sizable apartment “Without a barn full of animals, this becomes a little more difficult.”I remarked, laughing.  
Sitting down on the bed, I picked up the cube and turned it over in my hands. It was a powerful piece of technology, and by chance, I had become its newest owner.  
But what if it wasn’t chance? What if this had been intentional, some devious plan by the Ellimist, or worse yet, Crayak? Another tide of memories flooded back to me, hours and hours of reading the terrors the Animorphs went through to fight and survive against a cosmic plan to defeat them. Why had the portal opened in the first place? Were there other portals? Had legions of Hork-Bajir Controllers suddenly stepped through onto the nations of Earth, killing anyone they saw?  
The Escafil device suddenly felt heavy in my hands, the edges more sharp and cold than inviting. I slunk off my bed and stared into my own eyes in the tall mirror across the room. Aside from the box, only the Christmas lights dotting the ceiling like stars illuminated my features.  
“I mean… if this was a crisis, I’d hear about it on the web, right?” I got up and typed in a few major news sites on my laptop. Nothing. Not even Google, Facebook or my phone suggested anything was out of the ordinary.  
Until I notice something, I should just enjoy this crazy, crazy gift! But… the box needs to be kept safe.  
I felt alive and unbidden with this power, suddenly uncaring of my work, my school, my cat even. Who cared about anything else? I could transform into any animal I touched.  
It was far too exciting to attempt dismantling the device, and I found a place to keep it whole. I pulled off my rain-soaked work clothes and put on something fairly tight. It wasn’t a leotard for sure, but it’d do. Then I grabbed a light jacket my bike helmet, and set off.  
Eva and Jorge were sitting somewhat awkwardly on the couch and stopped talking when I came into the room.  
Eva seemed genuinely seemed to have bought my excuse for sprinting hellbent through the apartment and the two of them gently invited me to watch anime, one of our favorite pastimes. I made up a weak excuse for leaving the house at 8pm on a Wednesday and got on my bike as fast as I could, speeding through several large puddles on my exit. I immediately regretted bringing a jacket- the humidity hit me like a wall. I pedaled through it, peaking at the top of our hill.  
Racing down the slope, past the spot where it had happened, I imagined myself flying.  
Soon!

The PetCo wasn’t too far, although it had often felt like a thousand miles carrying a box of cat litter. The sign was half-broken, only the dog and the word “Pet” glowing in the black of the plaza night. The place smelled like the typical blend of animal deodorants and wood chips and I hesitated to ask one of the employees to help me, since I had no intention of buying.  
One surly looking girl with a thick highlight of faded orange hair was stalking the aisles menacingly, scanning various each item with an aggressive beep.  
“Uh, hi, excuse me?”  
Her voice was a tired drawl. “Hi, welcome to PetCo, what can I help you find today?”  
“I wanted to ask- can we hold the pets to see if we want to buy them?” I asked, trying to sound as sweet as I could.  
Her expression turned to an eye roll and she called for another employee, who happily took me to the birdcages with a key in hand.  
She was friendly, and immediately started up a conversation. “So miss, do you have any pets already?”  
“I do! I have a cat named Cork, named after-”  
She looked surprised. “A cat?”  
“Oh!” I nearly smacked my forehead.  
“That’s pretty dangerous if you are looking to buy a bird! You know the average lifespan of birds living in captivity with the common housecat is only three years…” Her friendly expression had turned sour, and I wracked my brain for a quick lie.  
“Uhm, actually, ah- It’s my mom’s cat. I’m just taking care of her for a week while she’s… out of town.” I totally sounded like I was lying.  
“I see,” The employee responded primly. We had reached the birds at that point, and she still seemed willing to unlock the cages.  
The birds each fluttered around, squeaking and cawing over the pile of strong smelling wooden chips lining the cage floor.  
“Miss, what kind of bird did you want?”  
I hadn’t considered that. “Well, Parakeets have always kind of annoyed me.” I spotted a dove, silently preening its pure white feathers with a gentle beak. “A Dove seems fine, thank you.” The employee nodded and extended a gloved hand into the fluttering, squawking cage and deftly pulled out the dove. On its ankle was a nametag that read “Angora”.  
“Why don’t you try petting her head? She’s very fond of customers.” I nodded and extended a single finger to graze the dove’s head. I focused, and the process began.  
The dove went sort of limp and her eyes closed completely. I hadn’t noticed the breathing before but it was definitely slower now. I could feel the acquiring beginning when the dove was retracted from under my finger.  
The employee had a concerned expression and was looking the bird over. “Hey, hey, girl, what’s wrong, you okay?” She was crooned softly to the dove. I had to shake myself out of a reverie.  
“I think she just, uh, looked relaxed!” I said perhaps a little too loudly.  
The employee eyed me warily. “It’s just I’ve never felt a bird go limp like that before.” I scowled internally, hoping it didn’t show on my face.  
Was it ever this difficult for them in the books?  
The smell of the place was really getting to me. Too sterile, too clean, too “customer friendly” for a bunch of animals that didn’t deserve to be reared and sold off like property to line someone’s pockets. The woman’s expression hadn’t changed, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking as she held the bird out of my reach.  
“You know what, ma’am, I’m fine. Thanks for your time.” I turned on my heel and nearly ran from the store, back out into the humid night, starless under the bright lights of the oppressive street lamps. I turned back, half expecting the employees to be staring at me. They were milling about like I hadn’t been there at all, and I could see the bird cage being closed and locked.  
What other chance will I have to acquire a bird?  
The idea of flying was an old fantasy of mine- it was possibly one of the main reasons I had been so obsessed with the Animorphs books. Every time I had looked up into that big great sky I just wanted to fall into it and get lost. The expression “You’ve got your head in the clouds,” was a practically a mantra parents and teachers defaulted to for years. The temptation was too much. Like I was watching myself in a dream, I took off the bike helmet and stormed back through the automatic sliding doors. Back into the hum of the fluorescent lights. Had to move fast, just touch the bird, acquire it, and get out. I sped past stacks of cat food and towards the sign with a bird on it, a colorful, happy looking cockatiel. I had the cage in my sights, and power walked towards it.  
I must look like a crazy girl.  
Angora was sitting in the same spot in the large cage, still silent and preening. Thankfully she was close to the bars. Breathing heavily, I put my trembling hand, small as it was, through the bars and around her body gently and felt her go limp. In only a few moments, I had done it.  
“MISS!”  
Uh-oh. The reverie was over. Time to go.  
“That woman is trying to shoplift!” The sound of booted feet running towards me set me off ata sprint, leaping over dog toy containers and displays of birdseed. The heat of the chase felt almost comical. I hadn’t looked behind me to see just who they’d sicked on me, but it all felt a bit much for what I’d done. The back door was in sight, and I ignored the small stitch in my side as I ran towards it. Out from the aisle on my left, dog medicine, stepped the surly employee, broad form blocking my path.  
Man, they are really pulling out all the stops here. Fortunately, this wasn’t my first time avoiding authority at high speeds.  
I almost stopped, afraid one or both of us could get hurt, until I saw the expression on her face. She looked as bored as she could possibly be. When she saw I wasn’t stopping, she stepped to the side and I blew right past her.  
Back out into the muggy night air, I looked for a place to hide; this needed to be one hell of a first morph. The trash container would have to do. It smelled rancid, but I jumped in and threw off my jacket, crouching down and focusing hard. First I focused on something, anything. My broken fingernail. The banana peel under my foot. The stale stench of rotting eggs. And then I focused on Angora, and I began to change. I had no idea what to expect first and hoped for the best. Like patterns beneath my skin, tracings of feathers painted themselves to my shoulders and emerged to the surface slowly, extending and stretching into full feathers, roots sticking out of me like quills. Then came the feet. Through the pliable cloth of my exercise-turned-work shoes sprouted four huge talons, mottled brown and shiny black. I felt the bones inside turn brittle and hollow, like someone had swept the floor out from under me, and I sat down on another pile of garbage. The wings had fully formed now- huge dove wings sticking out from my shoulders. I felt the features of my chest and neck melt and squirm as they made the shift to simple, aerodynamic bird muscles, also sprouting feathers. The beak pushed itself from my face like a hungry bird would, and my voicebox stretched and shrunk, forcing out an unintentional squawk. My vision sharpened and stretched, stretched until I could see either side of the dumpster, but not right in front of me. I shrunk from approximately a girl sized bird to a dove, marveling as the world grew to comedic proportions.  
And that was it. Now standing in a single, shredded shoe, was me. A dove. I heard voices, angry, shouting I thought, but that wasn’t important, they were far away, doing human things. What was important was that I was hungry. Hungry and on top of a mountain of discarded food. I liked the smell coming from a box, saw small seeds poking out of bread. Turn one eye to the bread, turn back, neck muscles precise, exact, sharp, and strong. I saw my target and struck, down and then up again, felt the small crunch and swallowed. Heard the humans again. Humans. Song. Loud. Danger?  
“Ah, it’s just one bird, Nettie. And she didn’t even steal it. Can we just wrap up so I can go home?”  
“It’s about the principle of the thing, Darlene! Maybe if you understood that you’d still have your job as Manager.”  
“Alright, I’m out. You can melt to death in the heat for all I care.”  
“Oh, stop that! I’m coming.”  
My mind broke the surface of the water like waking from a warm bath and then sat up with a start.  
I stretched my wings, felt the lightness of my form, reached out into the bird’s brain and felt a carnal, primal connection with even such a simple little thing. She was beautiful. A simple mind that had simple needs and- felt- in a way, happy? Content. She could feel content, less afraid at times, when she could clean her feathers, feed her children.  
Taking off wasn’t difficult and the feeling of gliding down on billowing wings made my feelings soar. I let out a shriek of thought-speak laughter and flapped into the thick air of the night.  
The trees to which I owed the oxygen I breathed became like mere toys as I rose above them, or like little bits of scenery on a very realistic diorama. I rose and rose, powering my little wings faster and faster, pushing the limits of this new body. I felt myself straining and finally looked down. Below, the earth was a messy floor full of infinite secrets to be discovered. I looked around my small body and knew I was in the great, distended belly of the sky. Around me was the mystery I forever marveled at as a mere mortal on the ground below. Suddenly, I felt immortal, like a lidless, floating eye simply witnessing the grandeur of the expanse of atmosphere.  
I floated like that for what must have been an hour, aware of the time, but just enjoying floating along living out a dream I had long forgotten.

 

CHAPTER 2

I was deep into into the oppressively hot night air by the time I saw from a bird’s eye view (hah) a place I recognized, which reminded me I should probably return to the real world. Alighting down to the place, a park several blocks from where I lived, I was able to navigate above the busy night streets home.  
The top of my apartment building slowly came into view, much bigger than I ever thought it was from the ground. I circled around the place a few times to see if I was just looking at it wrong. It made sense that I didn’t think about the rest of the building all that much. Pretty often I would go straight from the driveway to my door. It could be easy to forget the rest of the world existed, let alone the other units in my apartment block. The trees extended a helpful branch that I graciously accepted, landing with a flutter a few feet away from a bereft bird’s nest. The dove’s vision was a little muddled by the deep blackness, but I could see the branches close to me with more detail than I could with human eyes. I felt the dove’s instincts resurface as I took a moment to take a mental deep breath, having to remember that this was all real. Ever since I had read the Animorphs books, I was forced to think differently. It had been after their glory days, I suppose, after the story was completed and after the 1990’s had become “last decade”. It was in my spare moments of childhood when I had found time to squirrel away myself and hide behind pages upon pages of adventure. As all good science fiction writing does, the books forced my perspective to change- I never thought they would force it to change as much as it had today, however. The orange light flooding from Eva’s open window caught my bird vision and made Angora’s instincts flare up in fear, but I abandoned the darkness and fluttered down to her sill, which was cluttered with nerdy stuff- trinkets and figurines, just like the rest of her room. The door was slightly ajar but Eva was nowhere to be seen. The temptation to go in was overwhelming, and despite having been in Eva’s room countless times before, I’d never been in alone. Something about my newfound power urged me forward despite my misgivings. I bird-hopped from the windowsill, managing to miss all of the obstacles along the way. Landing on the carpet was easy, and with talons outstretched I bobbed across it, not even knowing what I was looking for.  
_The bristly, colorful, admittedly dirty carpet looked alive- moving like trodden plants coming back to form that my keen eye and perfect neck muscles could keep up with. Curiosity egged me on and I begrudgingly indulged it, fluttering again onto the chair and then onto Eva’s desk._  
The desk of a college student. It was a crowded party, homework forgotten and covered up by at least four cups, most half-empty with various liquids, by the smell of them. A tablet with an expensive- looking case turned on, screen alight with some notification. It pulsed and beeped. Nosiness had gotten the better of me, and nearly without meaning to, I craned my bird neck to see what it said. Half of it was covered by a discarded ball of paper, and on top of that, something about the type of light made it very difficult to see with Angora’s eyes. I could only make out a single word: Sharing.  
My heart skipped a beat, and at that exact moment, I heard a pair of feet pounding up the stairs and toward Eva’s room.  
“Yeah, I just heard it, I’ll be right back.”  
I was paralyzed by indecision for only a moment before Angora’s instincts took over again and I was out the window. Eva’s confused face stuck out the window, looking up into the sky after me, a confused “What the hell,” escaping her lips.  
I shouted to myself in thought-speak. I tried to remember if the word on the screen had been capitalized but it was so blurry through one eye that it was impossible to tell. Not that it probably even mattered, but my brain was on overdrive. I landed on the ground behind a tree and willed myself back to human. The Animorphs has been right about morphing not hurting one bit, but rather being like being punched through a door. The pain was happening elsewhere, to something else and not me.  
Once the grinding, schlooping and crunching noises had stopped, I stood, shaking slightly.  
“Oh. Right, I left my shoes. I guess the cost of morphing on the fly like that is a pair of shoes.” I sighed, but breathed deeply and looked at my quivering hands. Human again- but not for long.

_“Yo! I’m home.” I was not a very ‘Yo!’ kind of person. I wondered if Eva and Jorge could tell I was nervous by that alone._  
“You’re back!” Jorge exclaimed.  
“Yep- just wanted to be out for a bit. Plus it’s like pitch black outside already.” I shrugged and landed on the couch next to Eva, who was peering out the living room window.  
“It’s not that dark,” she said quizzically. Following her gaze through the window I had to admit that it was not as dark as when I had been in dove morph. They must have poor night vision.  
“And where are your shoes?” Jorge laughed.  
I shrugged playfully. “Would you believe me when I said a bird took them?” Before they could ask questions about that story, I picked up on the first thing that came to mind. “So what are you guys watching, anyways? What kind of weird anime do you two get up to when I’m not here?”  
That seemed to sober up both of their questioning pretty quickly, and Jorge looked a little ashamed.  
“It’s Ghost in The Shell: Arise,” Eva said defiantly.  
I gasped, mocking horror. “No… but you two are purists!”  
“It was her idea.”  
“I read a review in this weird, back-alley forum that found us those deleted scenes from the Gurren Lagann movie. It wasn’t by the same person, but I like the people on this forum, and they recommended some of the character’s designs!” Eva retorted defensively. “And to be fair, most of the movie has been money grabbing rehashes at the expense of Motoko’s character, but I couldn’t resist anymore.”  
Jorge laughed. “This would never have happened if it hadn’t been for your random night bike ride.”  
“He’s right- we’ve been waiting for you to join us for like a week and a half!”  
I had been pretty busy even outside of work, and time was something I had been trying to make more of these days.  
“I promise, guys, I’ll be around more,” I made brief eye contact with Eva, who had a stoic expression. I kept seeing the word from her tablet imprinted on my vision and looked for something in her eyes. I knew it was foolish- to suspect her, and if she even was a Controller, that she would be imperceptible from her real self. “I think I’m going to call it an early night and just get to my room. Wouldn’t want to interrupt your bad anime binge fest anyways.” We laughed and they got it. I knew they both worked just as hard as I did and could both be just as reclusive. It’s why living together was as easy as it was.  
As soon as I closed the door behind me, my head felt like a nearly filled teacup, threatening to spill over if I stumbled. I leaned against the sheet music I had pinned to the back of my door and tried to keep everything straight for just a moment.  
“What a day.”  
I wiggled my shoe-less toes, remembering what it felt like when they were tiny, fragile talons. In the cricket chirping filled darkness of my room, the only light source came from a projector I had since I was a kid. It rotated slowly speckles and stars across my ceiling and walls. As I blinked, everything else fell away and I floated motionless in space among the stars. Space had never felt so big. The universe was now proven to be, truly, larger and more complex than I could have imagined. Or perhaps it was a multiverse? Thoughts of battles in outer space and strangers from other worlds hiding among humans flooded my mind. The thought that there could be Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, Arn, Andalites, out there among the stars hit me like a punch to the stomach.  
“Whoa.”  
I slumped to the ground and hit the light switch as I fell. I was broken from my imagination and brought back to earth by a dull pain on my tailbone. My eyes refocused and I heard a cheerful chirrup from Cork, sitting patiently on the floor next to me.  
“Oh hey, you, get into any trouble while I was gone? Nah, you’re such a good kitty,” Cork seemed to agree as I scratched his chin.  
My heart skipped a beat as I remembered the Escafil device, just sitting here in my room. I upended the dusty box of clothes and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the box’s pearly blue glow. It felt warm in my hands. Living in a repurposed old house came with many drawbacks, but one advantage such a building had over an admittedly nicer new apartment was the innumerable nooks and crannies one could find for just about anything. A board had come loose in my first week in the room,and I had used it countless times to store everything from Eva’s favorite candy to cash. I pulled a blu-ray copy of The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior and handful of Bubble Dubble bubble gum from inside the dusty chamber and tried to force the box inside. The cube was about a half-inch too big.  
“I was sure that was going to work,” Grumbling, I sorted through piles of stuff and roamed the room for any hidden corners. I was short enough to fit under the hanging rod in my half closet and resolved to put it in a box with some old shoes behind the lip of the door frame. From the extreme perspective on the ground, I felt an old, familiar sense of comfort. The same sort of nostalgia I got from the musty smell of old books and the safety of reading alone for hours. Countless memories of the Animorphs’ stories trickled to the front of my mind as I sat in the closet, enjoying feeling small again. They had always been committed to resisting, to fighting back.  
“What if the Yeerks were on Earth? What then?” If they had been able to survive they would have needed a boatload of Kandrona if they had come through the portal. If they had infiltrated Earth from space it would be just like it was in the books. “If they’re real, and out there, I’ll fight them.” My voice sounded awkward and shaky speaking the words aloud, and I wasn’t even sure if I meant them, truly. I took the Escafil Device out of the shoebox and turned it over and over in my hands like some sort of impossible, monochrome Rubik’s Cube. I became lost in thought for nearly an hour, eventually distracted by the pain of sitting in such an uncomfortable position on the floor. Feeling like I had gotten nowhere with the tangled thoughts of alien invasion, I paced the room. After a minute I fell down onto the bed and thumbed over the buttons on the wireless receiver for the house phone I had insisted on buying for my room, despite owning a cell phone. What felt like hundreds of times I had sat here staring out at the sky talking endlessly to friends, mainly Christine. She was as much a part of that phone as the buttons were, and I had already dialed her number before I had even thought it through.  
The line crackled to life. “Hello? Marina?”  
“Hey! Yeah, it’s me!”  
Her voice picked up a moment to a singsong trill. “How are you?”  
I mulled over the question for a second. “I’m good.”  
“You answered that very carefully.” She laughed. She had a beautiful laugh.  
“I wanted to give you my most completely true answer. Anyways, I’ve been just kind of thinking something over.” Her silence said she was ready to listen. “I guess I was feeling some ennui.”  
“Uh-huh.” She drawled.  
“Well, okay, you know how in War of the Worlds when the aliens attack, the people have no idea what’s happening? They have no frame of reference for how to understand the aliens, so they refer to them as men with ugly mugs or animals?”  
“Oh, yeah. It was the first alien invasion book, right?”  
I nodded. “I think so. Definitely the most popular. I just can’t stop thinking about what it’d be like to be suddenly invaded, and what I’d do. When the Mayans or the Indigenous Tribes were invaded, how did they feel? That same mass panic at something so alien?”  
“Good point,” I could hear her moving through the house. She couldn’t help but pace when she talked on the phone. “I think that’s why that book was written. It was very timely. You worried about an alien invasion nowadays?”  
My first reaction was to say something very scientific, like if aliens existed they had already been monitoring us for years or there was no chance they could make it to Earth anyways. However, the fact that I could now transform into a bird made me pause from that knee-jerk response. I didn’t know how to explain how I was feeling without sounding crazy. I decided to just deny her question and move on.  
“I just think that if an alien invasion was happening, I’d want to fight back. Like how we resist The Man. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Third part of the story! if my Italian seems really horrible it's because it is and I use google translate

A stunted trip to work the next day was the result of my gawking at an empty bike rack on the side of the building.  
“I’m so dumb. My bike is still locked up at PetCo.” I grumbled, the obvious solution hanging in my mind. “I should really keep some clothes at work and just fly there.” I wouldn’t be able to just leave my uniform and bag behind, so I walked the regular route through the train tracks. After a few minutes walking alone beneath the warm sky, it occured to me that I should obtain a morph that could actually carry things. I lost track of where I was, dreaming up places to acquire new animals. The opposite side of town had at one point been a thriving place for local businesses, maybe twenty years ago or so. Now, for some reason there was only a small industrial park and miles of abandoned tarmac peppered with remains of local architecture. My parents had always driven me through a stretch of highway that had overlooked the saddest looking parking lots I have ever seen. The sun had burned away most plant life and cracked the asphalt, worn down the storefronts and peeled paint from signs like it was being boiled. It had been faded like an old photograph, beset upon by the tribulations of time itself.  
It had never struck me as sad at the time. All I saw was the strange, lonely beauty of a near desert with local 90’s buildings sitting like abandoned ruins. I knew there were all sorts of animals that wandered wild, and the idea to travel there seemed much more reasonable with the ease of the dove morph. Even something as simple as a deer made me excited inside with an intense, childish greed.  
I stopped walking abruptly, for a moment unsure why. I looked up and, blinking, saw the bright, sparking portal in my vision for just a moment. It was the spot where I’d found the cube. My gaze lingered, curiosity longing to be satisfied, questions tumbling silently from my open lips before my legs pulled me away, more rational and responsible than my insatiable curiosity.  
I jogged the last few paces, just on time for work, scooting in the back of the restaurant and changing in a whirlwind into a slim black t-shirt and matching apron. I walked onto the floor pen and pad in hand when Mr. Lucci held out a strong, large-palmed hand. “Basta.”  
“Che cosa-”  
He reached out and plucked a small, white feather from my hair and stared at me, then the feather, then me again with a questioning look. When I just smiled blankly, he rolled his eyes ever so slightly and stepped aside, beckoning me past.

Work was simple and pleasant, settling into the comfortable rhythm that accompanied a home-cooked meal. Which Mr. Lucci of course wasn’t technically making, since the restaurant wasn’t home, but he made it feel like it to the customers and to the employees. After seven hours on my feet, however, I decided some relaxing was worth it and found a favorite spot in the town green across the street. The comfortable bench felt like a blessing, and I pulled out the small black book I used for sketching and the occasional thought. It had only been two days since it happened, and I was flooded with excitement at every chance I could get to morph. The image of Angora lingered in my mind, and I found myself drawing the silky white bird with clarity. Her soft beak had been my mouth. I shaded it in gently, imagining brushing it with the tip of my finger. And her wings had been my arms, propelling me easily through night time updrafts.  
I felt an itch on my shoulder and scratched it absentmindedly and did a visible double take when I felt short feathers.  
“Do you mind if I sit here?”  
I spun around, hand clasped tightly to my bare shoulder. A tall, dark haired guy with pursed lips gestured hesitatingly to the empty seat beside me.  
“Uhm- sure!” I hammered the thought over and over in my head- Demorph, demorph! You’re human! Just breathe. It didn’t help that the guy was hot in a way that had caught me off guard. He simply sat down casually next to me and opened up a tattered old book.  
Once the feathers had receded back into my skin, I was able to catch a glimpse of the cover. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. A classic science fiction book! Neat.  
“You like Bradbury?” He had caught my gaze. I hadn’t expected him to actually say anything. First coming out of the blue and now striking up a conversation with me, a stranger.  
“Sure.” I replied simply.  
He turned he book over to look at the cover. “Well, this is my first time reading him. Never been much into the classic stuff.”  
I smiled tentatively. “It’s good to get to the roots of the stuff you like.” He seemed relaxed and very comfortable just shooting the crap with me in the middle of the park.  
He nodded slowly. “What kinda stuff are you into?” He leaned a little closer to take a look at the black sketchbook in my hands. “Birds, huh? Are you a bird watcher?”  
“Not exactly.”  
“Just an artist?”  
“This is my- pet bird. Her name is Angora.”  
“Cool. I have a cockatoo. His name is Jack.” He smiled. “I’m Cesar, by the way. C-E-S, not the Roman guy.” His hand was extended, the audacity of the sudden offer to shake it making me take pause. He was incredibly forward, like we were at a crowded party, and it was either socialize or be socialized with. All that was missing from the two of us was more revealing clothing and red solo cups. And something else was off- he has just leaned over and stolen a look at the drawing, and suavely too.  
Whether it was regular social anxiety or my morphing-related paranoia, I closed the book and got up. “It was nice to meet you, Cesar. I should really get going, though.” I shouldered my bag with a huff under my breath and once I had taken a few steps, threw a slant-eyed glance over my shoulder. The Martian Chronicles was lying closed on his lap and he was eyeing me with a relaxed confidence. The way someone might look if they had seen a move on a chessboard they knew you hadn’t.

It was almost 8 by the time I got home, desperate to get rid of my stuff and morph bird. As much as it might have made sense for Spider-Man or some other vigilante to store their stuff places, I had no doubt in my mind it would be stolen before I could return from morph. I should travel lighter. I want to be able to go for a fly in the middle of the day. The headphones can stay at home.  
The empty couch looked like an animal without an owner, lonely and disheveled. The TV had been left on, which I attributed to Eva’s forgetfulness. They had probably been waiting for hours to watch something with me and given up. I couldn’t blame them, since I’d been gone pretty much all day, and a pang of guilt nesting in my stomach reminded me this was the third time I’d cancelled spending time with them.  
Most people hardly even know their roommates. It’s not like I have any real commitment to them, right? I’m just trying to make nice.  
I shook the rude, unfriendly thought from my head and kicked off my shoes and ran up the stairs. Cork was waiting patiently on my bed but I only pet him a moment. There was a whisper on the slight breeze blowing through my window that beckoned me back into the shimmering night. I suddenly felt outside myself for a moment, able to clearly see myself in mind’s eye, remembering my work earlier that day at the restaurant, serving and bussing and running to and fro. Looking back on my pretense of ignorance and regularity I seemed so small, so rudely insignificant, now that I felt I knew more. I stripped off my outer clothes, back down to the tight fitting black outfit I prayed would continue to work for this process.  
The changes to bird came more easily than before, starting off with an almost angelic shift from arms to long, white wings. My face plunged out and downward next, forming a pointed, hardened shape. I began to shrink in size and become more bird proportioned, while my feet became scratchy, harmless talons. The dense weight of my bones and heavy internals felt like a training weight being lifted from my shoulders as I hollowed out. The itchiness of feathers sprouting like weeds from my skin bothered me less this time than it had before, and I stretched as the transformation reached its conclusion. I flapped up onto the windowsill and realized one particular cat was standing, back arched, tail puffed up like a great marshmallow.  
I asked myself, and turned to face Cork. His fear seemed to turn to curiosity and he took a tentative step forwards. He gave me a predatory look and I knew it was time to leave.  
The house still looked bigger than I thought it was, even from the height I had reached in the clear night air. Yet it faded away from me as I flapped towards the treeline under the gleaming half-moon.  
The five senses are a total myth, the kind of outdated science that I felt like considering reminiscent of the discovery of the earth being round. We as humans are so focused on our own experiences in our own bodies, we can’t imagine, really, on a gut, instinctual level how creatures look at the world in more than five ways. We all have a personal sense of balance, inertia, spatial reasoning, and in a controlled flight, in Angora’s fragile, white body, it felt as relevant as seeing or hearing to maintaining a level head. I tried to imagine being the bird without that feeling and it was like imagining myself blind. My untethered body would flail and crash into a tree or the ground, crumpling like paper.  
But given all Angora’s faculties, all which were now mine to share, flight was an effervescent, free, weightless feeling compared to slogging around on two feet. The world below was an intricate painting, and still and dark like a quiet, bottomless sea. I let the air currents carry me and soon found myself descending over the road, and what must have been the entrance to the cemetery on my route home. Even from above, the headstones seemed to loom in the quiet dark, given pale faces by the cloudless moon. I landed atop one hesitantly, trying to manage the bird and human fears of being out in a cemetery after dark.  
It’s not that I hadn’t been an outdoorsy sort of kid. Hell, I was a little notorious for doing dangerous stuff even from a young age. Long, churning rivers ran surreptitiously through the deepest parts of the neighborhoods, where cars never reached and bicycles served as steeds, tamely and reliably waiting as their masters jumped fences, scaled down rock faces and crawled into abandoned buildings. I’d explored over twenty different filthy, run down empty places that stood as testaments to something or other that had been lost. Businesses crumbling with time, foreclosed property, asbestos infested offices were no match for the hooligans around the block.The difference now, aside from being a bird, was that I’d always had those hooligans with me. Memories of them tended to run a little bittersweet- I had been the only girl running with the boys, some of them quite a bit older than me. It hadn’t mattered too much until we’d all started highschool, and misogyny and teenage cruelty started to rear its greasy, pimply head. And eventually, we stopped going altogether.  
I sat there on that headstone, staring deep into the forest I’d only been to once. I wondered if the Animorphs would have stayed together as friends if they hadn’t been burdened by the responsibility of war. 

The trees were thick and untamed, and I could see even from my morbid perch that the ground sloped sharply downward, which had been difficult as a biped, but perhaps not as a bird. Roots and undergrowth were part of the journey down the steep drop as a human, but my bird instincts’ first thought of them was food. I fluttered to the edge of the cemetery and took a deep breath.  
As a child, old buildings had held ancient secrets and marsh-like lakes were unexplored pools of magic. The forests were overrun with mysterious creatures the hooligans would confirm were just squirrels, but I had always been convinced I’d seen a big raccoon this time, and that was a tortoise shell, not just a rock! So as I fluttered from branch to branch carefully down the crevasse into the earth, the familiar, but identifiable sense of fantastical paranoia crept upon me as I lowered myself into that pit as a small, white bird.  
The trees grew sideways out of the sharp, sloping ground here and then straight up, reaching and stretching just to fight for a smidgen of sunlight in this deep ravine. To my sides, the forest became dense so that my weak night vision could only make out the rotund, dark shapes of the strangely shaped trees. This was farther than I’d gone before and I wondered what would be at the heart of this weird wood. I used the torque of my flight and slowed my momentum to land on a low hanging branch above a mossy clearing.  
I remember my last thought being of demorphing before things suddenly went blank.

**Author's Note:**

> PLOT SUMMARY
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> Marina, the protagonist, is a 20-something finishing college and living on her own. She likes to think she knows where she's going but is so busy with a job (or two) it can be hard to keep things straight. And then, one day her wildest dream comes true. The Morphing Cube (Escafil Device, Blue Box, whatever you want to call it) appears before her! She is thrilled to have the superpowers of her dreams but can't help but wonder where it came from, and if it is here, then what else Alien could be on Earth?


End file.
